The Battle for Top AI Talent Only Gets Tougher From Here

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The Battle for Top AI Talent Only Gets Tougher From Here

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Andrew Ng helped create two of Silicon Valley's leading artificial intelligence labs. First, he built Google Brain, now the hub of AI research inside the internet giant. Then he built a lab in the Valley for Baidu, the company known as the Google of China.

Ng was one of the primary figures behind the enormous and rapid rise of AI over the last five years as everyone from Facebook to Microsoft rebuilt themselves around deep learning. And on Tuesday night, he announced his departure from Baidu.

He didn't say where he was going. And he didn't immediately respond to our request for comment. But odds are, he will show up at some other big name sometime soon. AI researchers are among the most prized talent in the modern tech world. A few years ago, Peter Lee, a vice president inside Microsoft Research, said that the cost of acquiring a top AI researcher was comparable to the cost of signing a quarterback in the NFL. Since then, the market for talent has only gotten hotter. Elon Musk nabbed several researchers out from under Google and Facebook in founding a new lab called OpenAI, and the big players are now buying up AI startups before they get off the ground.

Today, this talent market may have shifted yet again. Chipmaker Intel just announced that it's building a lab for far-looking AI research, and company vice president Naveen Rao says Intel is prepared to pay up for the caliber of talent that now works inside Google Brain or the Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research Lab. "We're looking for researchers that could potentially go to these other places," he says, acknowledging the big dollars this will require. Asked if that could include a top name like Andrew Ng, he said, "Absolutely."

Such ambition shows just how large the AI movement has become. Intel is launching a lab not because it wants to ultimately build its own AI, but because it wants to sell the enormous number of computer chips that others will need to build their AI. Today's AI movement revolves around deep neural networks, complex mathematical systems that can learn tasks by analyzing vast amounts of data. If you feed millions of cat photos into a neural network, for instance, it can learn to identify a cat. Typically, when a company like Google or Facebook trains a neural network in this way, it uses hundreds of GPU chips, graphics processors suited to this kind of math. And most of these GPUs come from nVidia, an Intel rival. Intel is hoping to build chips that replace GPUs. Last year, it acquired Rao's chip startup, Nervana, for a reported $400 million, believing its tech can help mount this challenge.

Now, with Nervana as an anchor, Intel is creating a new product development group dedicated to AI. Rao will oversee the group, and he says this effort will include a research lab that explores entirely new concepts in deep learning and related areas, all with an eye toward building chips that the Googles and Facebooks will want. "We're actually going to have an emphasis on research—three, five, seven years out," he says.

In some sense, this move is Intel desperately trying to market itself as a serious alternative to nVidia GPUs. And at this point, it's just not. But even that desperation underlines the importance of the new AI chip market, which is rapidly remaking computer data centers. If Intel actually hires people like Ng, maybe we can believe its hype—and the AI competition will get even fiercer.